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Revitalization at five years: Remington, Brown and Skinner

Five years after Denver voters gave Denver Public Schools $2.3 million yearly to revitalize failing schools, the results in North Denver are decidedly mixed. Three schools received revitalization funds in the first go round: Brown and Remington Elementaries, and Skinner Middle School. Remington is closing next year, the most glaring failure, and almost a total write-off of taxpayer investment. Skinner Middle has turned away from its revitalization program, and represents the mixed bag so often characteristic of school reform. Brown, once the poorest performing school in the area, now has one of the best track records of improving student performance in North Denver.

Brown has shown the most success post-revitalization, with improving test scores and strong parent support for the school’s Intenational Baccalaureate (IB) program. Brown was controversial early, with every teacher at the school initially fired. New leadership transformed the school, and families choiced into the school in substantial numbers.

But alarm bells went off in the Brown parent community last month when funding for the expensive IB program was at risk. Brown did not receive a school improvement grant for the 2008-2009 school year, and funding for an IB coordinator and a foreign language teacher, both part of the requirements to stay in the six-year long hunt for the IB certification, couldn’t be found in Brown’s regular budget. While Brown has been accepted into the IB Primary Years accreditation program, it has not yet completed the course.

Suzanne Loughran, Brown’s principal, says that Brown has received a “long-term commitment from the district” to fund IB, citing a letter of support from Superintendent Michael Bennet. But Loughran does not know the source of the dollars. “I look forward to getting a better understanding of why we were not funded as a Beacon school.” Brown’s funding needs for International Baccalaureate are estimated to be in excess of $130,000 each year, including a $4,500 application fee paid yearly to the IB umbrella organization. Whether the means or the political will exist within DPS to maintain that funding for the long term is an open question, given the constantly shifting sands of school reform funding. Brown has been successful in attracting foundation grant dollars to support professional development for teachers, a key ingredient in improving student achievement and meeting IB goals.

Councilman Rick Garcia said that he was told by DPS Community liasion Happy Haynes that money for IB would be found and restored. The foundation for success at Brown has been preserved, at least for another year. More importantly, DPS has kept the faith with parents who have choiced into Brown, as much as two-thirds of Brown’s entering students, using Loughran estimation.

“DPS has stated that they are going to continue to fund the IB program at Brown,” says Tony Curcio, a parent at Brown. “We’re looking for a commitment for Brown, Lake (middle school) and a future Northwest Denver Diploma (high school) program.”

The Brown funding issue points out just how difficult funding reform is. Change and programming require funding, dollars that are just not contemplated in DPS’ standard budgeting system. Those dollars also raise questions of funding equity — schools in line for revitalization money (now called Beacon Schools) receive more money per student than other schools. Revitalization was supposed to be the foundation for sustainable change, but that has not been the reality.

The lessons at Brown, one of DPS’s Beacon Schools, may be equally difficult to replicate. Involved parents and prepared students are critical ingredients to school success. Parents most engaged are most likely to choice into schools showing success — a causal conundrum that administrators and think tanks don’t want to admit, at least in public discussion of school success.

At Skinner, after a contentious community process, the Integrated Arts model was adopted, and funded at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a change of principal meant the model was partially abandoned, leaving observers questioning DPS’s commitment to community input in school reform.

At Skinner today, vestiges of revitalization remain. The AVID program, which both helps to organize students, provides them with learning skills, and structures the classroom environment, remains, trademark binders and all. AVID is a fourth- through twelfth-grade system to prepare students in the academic middle for four-year college eligibility. And Integrated Arts lives on, in the form of professional development, and many Skinner teachers have been trained in a Denver University program that teaches them to use the arts to enliven the classroom and leverage learning.

Despite student achievement problems and declining enrollment, the level of instruction in two classrooms visited at Skinner is high. The school has three Teach for America teachers this year, benefiting from the national program that seeks to put graduates from America’s elite universities in urban classrooms. That has added to Skinner’s teaching corps, without a budget drain. But the beat goes on, as the declining enrollment means the middle school will be cutting teachers again next year.

DPS has inaugurated a new budgeting approach, which, within limits, puts students at the core of the funding process. But the dollars are still too fragmented, too restricted and ultimately, too few, to make meaningful changes in programming sustainable, successful propositions. Programs, particularly computer-assisted learning interventions, are too expensive to be within the reach of many schools. Further complicating the picture is the high cost of personnel. DPS’ budgeting requires that each teacher cost a school over $62,000- even though teachers with full benefits often make much less. So a school that is able to find $35,000 in its budget to pay for a reading specialist or a program coordinator is still unavailable to hire a full-time teacher for the role. Those limits constrain innovation and student achievement by placing bureaucratic rules ahead of student progress. The DPS Budget Guidance Manual for 2008 runs 55 pages, complete with clip-art from 1989. Almost every page contains restrictions on how schools can spend dollars, and admonitions that deviations have to be approved at the highest level of DPS administration. The result is a central planning document that may stifle finding new solutions. The words “flexible” and “innovate” are not to be found even once in the document.

For taxpayers and parents, DPS’ mixed record of success suggests both the difficulties and the potential for transforming struggling schools. But DPS still has yet to fully integrate the reality of school choice into an institutional perspective that gives students the best chance at success.